This is the tale, soaked in sex and blood, of how futanari Dr. Ashima Safar becomes one of the immortal undead, and what she does with those powers.

One night two of her favorite patients show up at her door. Musette and Ashlyn tell her they're vampires and naturally she doesn't believe them.

In a bloody, disturbing, and most of all orgasmic futanari menage--the last one of her mortal life--the two prove to the doctor that vampires are indeed very real. When she next awakens, she is forever changed.

She has a trip to make to a small, ancient town in the Saudi desert. And she doesn't care what she has to do or who she has to kill to get there. A man from her tortured past lives there with whom she has unfinished business.

Because one good turn...

Get yours on your ereader now: http://mybook.to/onegoodturn
Because One Good Turn is new, it doesn't have a ton of reviews yet, but the ones it does have are stellar and warm my horny little heart:

There are books that you read, books that you enjoy, and books that you experience. It's the difference between merely consuming the random assembly of dead letters on a page, and being consumed by the illusionary world they create. For the all-too-brief span of a single evening, One Good Turn was one of those books, sinking its teeth into me, holding me close, and refusing to let go until we both lay spent and empty upon the final page.

Bryce Calderwood is, quite simply, a true master of erotic horror. The imagination demonstrated here is astounding, but the quality of the writing is even better. It's a combination that makes for a deliciously deceptive read, with the writing itself almost too good for such weird, wild, wanton material. There's a passion to the storytelling that doesn't often make it through the interference of mainstream editors and publicists.

There are two narrative threads here, one dealing with supernatural monsters, and the other with human monstrosity. Ashima is a fascinating character, and one who embodies the very idea of rebirth and transformation. The greed and cruelty of a Saudi Arabian sex-slave ring transformed her the first time; the wealth and perversity of Japanese businessmen transformed her the second time; and the hunger and lust of Futanari* Vampires transformed her the final time. She is a complex woman, mentally and emotionally scarred from her childhood experiences, with the issues of power and control driving her in interesting ways. Her final transformation is not one that comes easily or instantly, and the way that supernatural seduction plays out is really the heart of the story.

This is a story that has its bloody, chilling, violent moments. As erotic and seductive as the vampires may be, Calderwood doesn't let us forget that they are monsters first - impossibly strong, bloodthirsty, dangerous creatures. Making them futanari vampires adds a whole new level of kink to their erotic aspect, however, and that's where the imagination of the story shines brightest. It's also where the theme of transformation gets a twist, in that the vampires looking to transform Ashima were themselves transformed into futanari by the doctor. Musette and Ashlyn's seduction of Ashima is breathtaking in its perversity, with acts that are as intoxicating as they are impossible, but the narrative strengths keep it from ever descending into mere literary porn.

If you have an open mind, a sense of erotic adventure, and an admiration for the beauty of imagination, then One Good Turn is worth checking out.

In order to understand what is happening in this book it is helpful to read the first Futanari Vampire book. I really enjoyed this book. It was awesome to see how Ashlyn and Musette added to their clan. I think the Dr. Is going to be a very good addition. I can't wait to see what happens next!

Read it for yourself

I don't know any author who wouldn't be happy with reviews like that. I'd love to know what you think of it, too. Get your copy: http://mybook.to/onegoodturn

24 January 2016

I get a lot of compliments on my book covers. I will humbly say they're not too shabby. I have something many writers don't: a background and experience in design and in using photo and image-editing software. However, I also have a background in teaching and in writing instructional material, so hopefully I can help you make better covers for your books. Please note this is for ebooks which do not require a spine or a back cover.

You see great book covers all the time as you browse books on Amazon or whatever. You see their pristine, flawless examples staring you in the face every day. And then you go to make your own cover and it looks like a toddler ate crayons and then shat on your screen. Or, worse, you think it looks great but in fact it looks like a toddler ate crayons and then shat on your screen.

So here are the broad brushstroke basics you need to know in order to make your own covers that look good.

Pixel Dimensions

Amazon wants your cover to be 1200 pixels wide and 1800 pixels tall. Pixels are the teeny-tiny dots of light on your screen. When it comes to screen resolution, the more pixels you can jam into the same amount of physical screen space, the higher quality your screen is. When it comes to works of digital art, pixels are of finite measurement like centimeters or inches.

Digital media can be created at a larger pixel size and scaled down (downsampled) to a smaller pixel size just fine. Pixels are discarded when this happens. However, if you try to make a small digital image larger (upsampled), it looks terrible. This is because your software has to add pixels where none existed before and despite all our amazing technology, it's not that good at it. Your image suffers quality loss as if you made a xerox copy of a xerox copy of a xerox copy.

Basically:

1200px wide by 1800px tall

Downsampling is cool, upsampling is usually Satan with a cat dick and should be avoided.

Image Sourcing

Alice K. Wayne's excellent book covers

Many erotica writers get their photos from Deposit Photos because of their sensible usage guidelines. For any service, make sure you check their guidelines. Some are okay with it as long as the pictures you use are tagged as erotic or sexy. In some cases, you can't show anything identifiable about the model.

There are models you can hire yourself if you have the money. What's weird about erotica is that you don't hire a photographer, who then finds you a model and performs a shoot. You hire the model, who then uses his or her own photographer to conduct the shoot.

But if you're new and/or cheap, you need to get creative. I had a friend who was a photographer kindly offer to shoot her own daughter for the cover of Enthralled. For my forthcoming book, Revenant, I put out the call to my readers to see if anyone fit the bill as a model. I was very lucky to have someone who was not only the perfect Musette, but she had a friend who was a photographer and who could produce quality images. I got the idea for this after hearing that my writer friend Alice K. Wayne used her own friends as models for her book covers.

What Should the Picture be of?

The image should cover several criteria:

It should of course comply with Amazon's guidelines (see above).

The cover image should be of a sexy person that appeals to the gender/orientation for whom you're writing, or a couple. In other words, if you write mainly for heterosexual women, then your cover should feature a sexy man.

People like to imagine themselves as the main character and they have their own ideas about what's attractive. This is why you often don't see all of the model's face on erotica covers. Mystery breeds arousal. This is not of course a requirement, it's merely a reasonable suggestion.

The image should not have anything too detailed or important where you'll want to put the text. Generally this would be the top and bottom thirds of the cover area.

The picture does NOT have to match anything exactly about your story. Also, the weirder the stuff you write, the harder this is to accomplish. You have any idea what most stock photos look like when I try to search for "sexy demon?" Like a chick in a fucking halloween costume.

If you're writing a series, all the cover images should have enough similarity or continuity between them so that all the books look like they belong together in a series.

The image should be discernable as a small thumbnail, because that's exactly how most people are going to first see it. This is why a simple closeup of some sweaty pecs & and abs is better than seeing an entire man standing against a fence in front of a landscape.

Good Cover Text

Good cover text is where most DIYers sin most egregiously. Cover text must be easy to read on a small thumbnail. Secondary to that is the style of the lettering. Most people fuck up both of these. Here are some tips:

Use Pixlr to create your covers. Even the "express" version can make nice covers, and because you have to pick from their fonts, you're less likely to pick a bad one.

Pixlr also has a more robust web application ("Editor" vs. "Express") that lets you use your own fonts, as do many image editing programs like Photoshop or GIMP.

Two fonts you should never use are Comic Sans MS and Papyrus. Those horses died a long time ago, for fuck's sake, stop beating them.

Avoid Arial/Helvetica and Times New Roman as well, as they're so common and plain they have no life or soul to offer your title.

Good cover text should be readable at thumbnail size. This means it needs to be big enough and stand out enough against the background.

Examples

I'll use my own covers as examples to illustrate my points.

Enthralled

The cover for Enthralled follows everything I said above. You don't see the model's entire face, and the text is large, stylish, and high-contrast. The image was photographed by a friend of mine. Using both the Editor and Express versions of Pixlr, I was able to create this cover. The one thing that would have improved it would be to make the title text white instead of red so that it stood out more.

A couple other elements worth noting are that I try to have the same formats and fonts for the author name on all my covers. This is so that they are more easily recognizable once you've seen one. I also try to put a quote at the very top above my name. The quote comes from a reviewer and is legit (why you want people reviewing your ARCs before you publish).

Futanari Loves Octogirl

For this series, I was able to follow my normal ideals for the first book's cover. For the second one, the character's eyes got in the way of placing the text where I wanted it. I couldn't do anything about the picture, so I moved the quote to above the title.

Creating these covers involved some advanced compositing where I combined several images together to get what I wanted. Although, the first book's cover wasn't that big of a deal: I combined a picture of a girl with a picture of octopus tentacles to imply an octogirl without showing such an impossible creature outright.

But notice how both covers have a similar look to them: both feature black and white photographs (for the most part) and the same fonts. The third book in this series will look similar to the first two.

If You Can't Be Bothered

I've been thinking about this a lot and I've decided to go ahead and do it. If you want me to design your covers for you, I will. The best way to contact me is to message me on Facebook. If we work together, you can pay me via Amazon gift card and each cover is $30 U.S. Get in touch with me and we'll discuss.

09 January 2016

As a niche, futanari is not the worst thing ever. It's popular enough that I can, less than a year after starting to write erotica, make enough money at it every month to pay a couple bills and have some "mad money." And I'm surprised and glad at the people I've introduced to it who'd never heard of it and ended up thinking it was really hot.

But I also get comments a lot to the effect of "it's really hot, but girls with giant cocks is not really my thing." That's understandable. Futanari is a weird niche because it attracts all kinds of people: straight, gay, lesbians, every point in between, and trans. The majority of futanari enthusiasts seem to be mostly straight males.

However, most erotica readers are straight women.

So you see the inherent conflict, here.

The question is: how do I write what I want to write and also sell books?

Could I write billionaire step-shifter MC BDSM stories? Yeah, sure. I could also KILL MYSELF.

Actually, I could write a story like that: as a parody. And then inevitably, some people wouldn't realize it's a parody and send me illiterate emails about how much they love it and then I'd have to kill myself, anyway.

My subconscious has been working on solutions to this dilemma. I only find out about this after receiving the product of that labor, usually known as a flash of inspiration. When I started on the second Futanari Vampires book, Revenant, I simply knew that the title character of that story would be male. My conscious mind and ego wanted to rebel against this. I strove to make this character futanari or even female. But no matter what I did, it just didn't feel right, because the character was "born" male in my subconscious.

So this means that Revenant will be full of male-on-futanari sex. For my female readers that are more or less straight, they'll have a chance to see how I write male characters. I hope y'all like it, because there's more coming in the future.

In the forthcoming steampunk sky pirate witch series, there will be all kinds of characters: futanari, male, female, and CATGIRLS (I may be a little excited about the catgirls). Futanari will still be there, but they won't be the main focus. They'll be part of a smoking hot erotic mix. This is something I want to write, very much, and it's also something I hope will sell well.

04 January 2016

Kindness is not sexual interest or desire. If you're mistaking simple politeness for sexual interest, you need to back the fuck up and examine where you went wrong in life.

Not liking something doesn't mean it's bad, wrong, evil, or immoral. It only means that your personal preference is otherwise. What you love can be (and probably is) just as wrong and stupid and bad to other people, so get over yourself. Keep your judgmental-ass mouth shut.

Publicly expressing how desperate you are for love or sex will not get you the kind of attention you really want It will attract losers and users and dick pics (or if you're male, you'll just be ignored entirely). Everyone feels lonely and bereft at times. Have some good friends whose shoulders you can cry on and keep that shit off your public timeline. Especially if you're an author selling books about love and sex.

If you truly cared about something or felt strongly about something, I would think you could take a moment to compose your own thoughts and feelings about it in your own words instead of being a sheep and copy/pasting the same fucking status as everyone else. All that tells me is that you're lazy and that you just want to feel good about yourself for a moment. Especially if you're a writer. Jesus Christ, fucking write something, and do it well. As soon I figure out your status is a paste job, I stop reading. I don't even care what it's about. Maybe that's just me, and maybe I'm kind of a dick about it, but why follow the crowd when you can blaze trails for others instead.

People are suckers for nice poetic phrases that for some reason always start with word "And," but ignore real wisdom or anything that requires true self-examination.

Being an indie self-published author means you are a one-person publishing company.It means you have to do or hire out everything that publishers do. You may not like all those other aspects to it, but if you fail at them, you won't sell books. People make a big deal about writing, but I'm sorry: writing is only the first step. It's merely the price of entry now.

Nearly everything you believe about the world is probably wrong. History is a lie. If you want to know the truth about anything, look at who's talking and how they get paid. Look at their agenda. Follow the money. If that's too much work for you then shut your mouth. Being informed is better than being opinionated. Snopes.com is your best friend. Ignore others' bloviating ignorance (if you had to look up bloviate, congratulations, it's an awesome word to have in your arsenal :) ).

I also made some great friends and those friends are great writers. Unbelievably, in the space of a few short months, I actually have fans. People actually buy my books, and that is an amazingly good feeling. Being appreciated is always good, but being appreciated for your filthy imagination and wordsmithing is even better!

2015: Year of the Futa Cock

I love futanari, that's why I made it my main niche in which to write. At first I was bummed because I felt like no one else liked it except other authors in the niche. But then, something interesting happened: I made converts. People took a chance and discovered that girls with both cocks and pussies and exaggerated sexual abilities are pretty fucking hot. That is simply amazing to me. Shit, I even influenced a couple other authors to dabble in the niche as well. That's just fucking crazy. Looking over what I've published, 2015 was definitely the year of the futa cock!

2016: Year of the Spicy Blend

I've been torn about something. As a writer, I want to do two things: I want to write what I love and I want to sell books. Those two goals need not be at odds with each other, but they definitely pull at each other. I can't compromise, not out of some high-minded sense of elitist artiste bullshit, but simply because there's no point for me to do otherwise. It has to be my way or the highway.

I've noticed that readers respond very favorably to the more "normal" sex scenes in Rough Rides. I get a lot of comments basically saying my shit is really hot and well-written but futanari just isn't their thing. You people are going to like what's coming down the pike in 2016. I have ideas for stories that are not a compromise on my part and which more readers will want to read one-handed.

Revenant: Futanari Vampires 2

When I conceived of the title character for this story, he was male. I actually tried to reimagine him as futanari or at least as female and that just didn't feel right. The revenant himself is 100% chiseled, hard male hotness. Musette, the book's heroine this time around in the series, is of course still a futanari. The scenes between her and the revenant are scorchingly hot and dominant.

The Erotic Adventures of Kitten and Big Daddy Magic

This will be a new series of shorts that are mostly sex scenes threaded together with some above-average story and setting. What will shine for these stories are the characters and the sex scenes. This will be Daddy Dom/little girl BDSM that will make your ass sting and leave bruises on your neck just from reading it. No futanari cocks, just Big Daddy Magic's thick hard meat doing all kinds of wonderful and terrible things to Kitten!

Steampunk Sky Pirates & Witches

Sometime later this year will see the first book in this series, which I'm still planning. What will be interesting about this series is that while it will have futanari in it, there will also be "normal" people and even catgirls. Instead of making futanari the main course, it will be part of the spicy blend. I don't have a series name yet, so for now it's just the "steampunk" series.

Between these two new series and continuing my existing series, I should have plenty to keep me busy in 2016. Who knows what surprises await? You never know what crazy shit I'll come up with. Thanks for coming along with me for the ride!

13 November 2015

There is a peculiar marketing phenomenon when it comes to selling erotica and romance. This funky beast lives only on Facebook, and it is known as the author takeover. How it works is that someone creates a Facebook event and creates a takeover schedule.

The event can be for the release of an author's new book, a cover reveal, a holiday, or anything, really. If they're smart, they'll tell you what time zone they're in and pin the schedule post at the top of the event page. If they're not smart enough to do these things, avoid that event or suggest it to them.

During author takeovers, the event host will usually post an introduction of the next author. You like this post and leave a comment to say hello to everyone. I like to tell everyone I'll be posting to the main wall of the event so they should refresh their pages in a few seconds.

Invite the entire fucking world

Hopefully you invited everyone you know to the event beforehand. Hopefully you shared the event on your own timeline and in any groups you're in.

Click "Choose Friends" and invite as many as you can. Yes, it might take a long time. You want to sell books or what?

Do it again for "Share Event." Certainly share in on your own timeline, but also choose to share in a group and then start typing the names of some groups you're in. A menu pops up listing some groups and you pick one. Type a little something and then share it.

Bonus tip: copy what you typed so you can paste it into the same field when you share it with other groups too. That way you don't have to type over and over.

If you have a Facebook group for your street team (you should) be sure to share it with them and have them invite everyone they know too. Tell them you need them to come make you look good by participating. They should gladly help you. If not, you need a better street team.

Getting ready

Author takeovers involve a lot of picture uploading and a lot of posting. To facilitate this, it's a good idea to have your book cover images, teaser graphics, and other pictures all collected into a folder on your computer or device. I have one creatively titled "Takeovers" (I know, right? Too cool for school).

It's also a good idea to have the text of your posts already written out and ready to copy and paste. Things like:

Descriptions of your book and the link to its Amazon page. I like to mention what drew me to write the story in the first place, because it seems people enjoy knowing that. Your passion becomes their passion.

A brief biography introducing yourself and what kind of stories you write, especially if you write for a particular niche or sub genre. Say things a potential book buyer would want to know. You're kind of auditioning, here, remember that. You're auditioning for a spot on their Kindle and some of their precious time.

Excerpts from your stories, the steamier the better.

Links to all your social media profiles so that new fans can stalk you.

I put all my texts literally in .txt files, but you can do it however you want.

During the event

My "bio" image I use for author takeovers on Facebook

Remember that the purpose of a takeover is to get new fans and readers. All they need is an excuse to like you and buy your shit. Let your passion for your stories show. Have fun and don't sweat it. The first time you do an author takeover you'll probably be nervous. The worst thing is talking to an empty room, which is why you made sure you brought all of your friends along with you.

I like to begin by posting my biographical "this is me" picture, a little something I whipped up in Pixlr.

Pro tip: Because Facebook likes to automatically create link previews for any link in your text, you should upload pictures FIRST, then paste or type in your text.

From there, I share my first book. Most takeovers give you an hour, which is enough time to adequately share two books. I've seen enough takeovers by other authors and done enough of my own experimentation to find some things that work well.

Facebook author takeover game

Post images of book covers and then in the text box, paste in your prepared text about the book. This text should at least be the book's Amazon description or blurb and a link to the Amazon page where it can be purchased. I like to also say why I wrote the book or series in the first place, people seem to really like knowing that stuff.

Post a teaser graphic and an excerpt from the book. I precede the actual excerpt with some kind of introductory text letting people know what the scene is (like how an actor on a talk show will "set up a clip" before they roll the footage). If you don't hany pictures that's fine, but you really should. They draw the eye.

Sometimes I will also post a bunch of teaser graphics and/or screenshots of good Amazon reviews. You want people to get excited about the book. If they like your teasers and see that others gave it good reviews, you're making it easier for them to do what they already want to do: buy new smut. You just want it to be your smut.

Once you get people worked up over the book, doing a giveaway can be fun and helpful. I like to make it revolve around the book. For example, I have a vampire series, so I found a picture of a vampire and added some text to it in Pixlr (a lot of people use PicMonkey too). I post this picture and ask people to go like my Facebook author page and then come back and post a pic of their favorite vamp. Later I randomly pick a winner (through random.org). You can send the winner a .mobi file of your book or actually gift it to them via Amazon, that's up to you.

Other tips

Refresh the page regularly

Follow up on people's comments and questions to your posts

There is NO HURRY. You may be nervous, especially the first time. Don't feel rushed. Everything will be fine.